Joshua Daniel Hartman

Activity ranking in LinkedIn feed

Users on an online social network site generate a large number of heterogeneous activities, ranging from connecting with other users, to sharing content, to updating their profiles. The set of activities within a users network neighborhood forms a stream of updates for the users consumption. In this paper, we report our experience with the problem of ranking activities in the LinkedIn homepage feed. In particular, we provide a taxonomy of social network activities, describe a system architecture (with a number of key components open-sourced) that supports fast iteration in model development, demonstrate a number of key factors for effective ranking, and report experimental results from extensive online bucket tests.